Monday, November 7, 2016

One of the new features of IntelliJ 7 is the support for Adobe's
Flex language. You can enable this support by going to the project
properties and adding a Flex facet, where you can specify the path to
the Flex SDK. I set it up, but there was none of the expected IDE help
for the ActionScript classes: no code-completion, class/type
suggestions, not even syntax highlighting. Some Googling reveals a few
more requirements: the JavaScript support plugin must be enabled (which
it was) and the File Type needs to be registered for *.as files. In my
setup, it was set to "Text files", adding the file pattern to
JavaScript files (with a prompt asking if you'd like to reassign it from
the existing text files setting -- very nice) and hitting OK then set
off a somewhat lengthy parse of the ActionScript classes in the project.
The Flex support is now working.

Kudos to Serge Baranov for the extremely quick support response and helpful guidance.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Our situation: our build server uses Ant to automatically get the
latest versions of the source files, build the application and deploy
it. A build number is updated in a properties file, but we lost the
ability to check that file back into source control. (no write access
for build user to source control server). This means the build number,
say 500, is always incremented to 501, packaged into the war file, and
sent out on the server. The next night, another automated build kicks
off and the properties file is retrieved with the current build number
set at 500. So the build process dutifully adds one to it, builds and
packages the application and sends it off to the server with the build
number at 501. Again.

We needed a way to increment the build number to accurately reflect
that a new build is generated and put out on the server - this helps not
only to keep tabs on how many times we build the application, but the
build number is also used as a random salt in the request parameters to
prevent caching issues with browsers.

Friday, October 14, 2016

For Christmas 2014, I got a pretty hefty gift: I was diagnosed with
stage 4 colon cancer. A large tumor in the sigmoid colon and several
smaller tumors had spread to the liver. Not a good thing to have.

I
am fairly young (mid-30's), never smoked nor chewed tobacco, rarely
drink alcohol, and my diet is pretty good. I could do with more
exercise but I am generally close to my "ideal" body weight. No family
history either except my maternal grandfather, who got cancer at a very
late age. What caused it? Was it some random charcoal bit from some
burnt toast? Was it that anti-freeze chugging contest? We will
probably never know.

Been doing chemotherapy treatments
for a while now. They are pretty excruciating. I've had to stop
working due to fatigue and weakness. Beware, there is a lot of
misinformation out there. Google is not your friend here.

I picked up a
book: American Cancer Society Complete Guide to Nutrition for Cancer
Survivors: Eating Well, Staying Well During and After Cancer. Lots of
evidence-based information in here. Comments on things like different
diets, different foods, etc.

I get to stay home more so I figure I will write more. Be positive, take care.